Comment by RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org on AI Lie: Machines Don’t Learn Like Humans (And Don’t Have the Right To)

Avram Piltch is the editor in chief of Tom’s Hardware, and he’s written a thoroughly researched article breaking down the promises and failures of LLM AIs.

And yet, we know that the work is mechanically derivative.

So is your comment. And mine. What do you think our brains do? Magic?

edit: This may sound inflammatory but I mean no offense

No, I get it. I’m not really arguing that what separates humans from machines is “libertarian free will” or some such.

But we can properly argue that LLM output is derivative because we know it’s derivative, because we designed it. As humans, we have the privilege of recognizing transformative human creativity in our laws as a separate entity from derivative algorithmic output.

So is literally every human work in the last 1000 years in every context.

Nothing is “original”. It’s all derivative. Feeding copyrighted work into an algorithm does not in any way violate any copyright law, and anyone telling you otherwise is a liar and a piece of shit. There is no valid interpretation anywhere close.

Every human work isn’t mechanically derivative. The entire point of the article is that the way LLMs learn and create derivative text isn’t equivalent to the way humans do the same thing.

It’s complete and utter nonsense and they’re bad people for writing it. The complexity of the AI does not matter and if it did, they’re setting themselves up to lose again in the very near future when companies make shit arbitrarily complex to meet their unhinged fake definitions.

But none of it matters because literally no part of this in any way violates copyright law. Processing data is not and does not in any way resemble copyright infringement.

This issue is easily resolved. Create the AI that produces useful output without using copyrighted works, and we don’t have a problem.

If you take the copyrighted work out of the input training set, and the algorithm can no longer produce the output, then I’m confident saying that the output was derived from the inputs.

There is literally not one single piece of art that is not derived from prior art in the past thousand years. There is no theoretical possibility for any human exposed to human culture to make a work that is not derived from prior work. It can’t be done.

Derivative work is not copyright infringement. Straight up copying someone else’s work directly and distributing that is.

There is literally not one single piece of art that is not derived from prior art in the past thousand years.

This is false. Somebody who looks at a landscape, for example, and renders that scene in visual media is not deriving anything important from prior art. Taking a video of a cat is an original creation. This kind of creation happens every day.

Their output may seem similar to prior art, perhaps their methods were developed previously. But the inputs are original and clean. They’re not using some existing art as the sole inputs.

AI only uses existing art as sole inputs. This is a crucial distinction. I would have no problem at all with AI that worked exclusively from verified public domain/copyright not enforced and original inputs, although I don’t know if I’d consider the outputs themselves to be copyrightable (as that is a right attached to a human author).

Straight up copying someone else’s work directly

And that’s what the training set is. Verbatim copies, often including copyrighted works.

That’s ultimately the question that we’re faced with. If there is no useful output without the copyrighted inputs, how can the output be non-infringing? Copyright defines transformative work as the product of human creativity, so we have to make some decisions about AI.

From Wikipedia, “a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of a first, previously created original work”.

You can probably can the output of an LLM ‘derived’, in the same way that if I counted the number of 'Q’s in Harry Potter the result derived from Rowling’s work.

But it’s not ‘derivative’.

Technically it’s possible for an LLM to output a derivative work if you prompt it to do so. But most of its outputs aren’t.

a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of a first, previously created original work

What was fed into the algorithm? A human decided which major copyrighted elements of previously created original work would seed the algorithm. That’s how we know it’s derivative.

If I take somebody’s copyrighted artwork, and apply Photoshop filters that change the color of every single pixel, have I made an expressive creation that does not include copyrightable elements of a previously created original work? The courts have said “no”, and I think the burden is on AI proponents to show how they fed copyrighted work into an mechanical algorithm, and produced a new expressive creation free of copyrightable elements.

I think the test for “free of copyrightable elements” is pretty simple - can you look at the new creation and recognize any copyrightable elements in it? The process by which it was created doesn’t matter. Maybe I made this post entirely by copy-pasting phrases from other people, who knows (well, I didn’t, only because it would be too much work), but it does not infringe either way…

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